Saturday, 20 November 2010

Devoxx whiteboard votes 2010

As usual at Devoxx, there were a number of Whiteboard polls.
These aim to capture the sense of the community and are of course only semi-scientific!

This year, picking questions was a little tricky, given the current disputes.
I decided to ask questions focussed on specific topics and provide a choice of responses.
Of course, you can never cover all valid responses, so there was always a comment area for extra opinions.

The +n notation after a comment means that n other people agreed with the comment.
The <- notation means that what follows is a comment on the previous comment.

Patent should help small reality to contribute! Not help huge industry to black mail each other! <- (Ponies and Rainbows anyone?)

What's JSR nnumber for Android!

A very clear answer was provided on this topic - devoxx attendees that voted were solidly against the lawsuit (over 87%).
While a high number thought there might be a case even more thought the lawsuit was just plain dumb.
If Oracle wants developers on its side, it is clear that the lawsuit is a problem.
As always, the comments were entertaining too.

This vote only started on Thursday, hence the lower voting figures.
The results ought to be predictable, but clearly a few want $free everything.
In general it looks like Oracle's paid vs $free choices are about right.

A clear statement from Oracle is needed on WHY they do not want to make it possible for others to have Java implementations (Harmony). Would like to hear BUSINESS reasons. +8

<-Maybe mreinhold could explain?

More communication is what will solve the problems & stop damaging speculation

Oracle should make TCK available w/o field-of-use restrictions. +5

Harmony FTW, keeps them true. +1

It should be. +1

Should be LGPL

There is definitely support here for other Java SE implementations, yet not a huge number of votes overall.
I suspect that amongst those that know the story it matters, but in general it doesn't.
I also find the (popular) comment for an explanation interesting.

What is your favourite non-Java language?

Scala

69

Groovy

42

Python

22

Javascript

22

Ruby

16

Clojure

8

Objective C

7

Smalltalk

7

PHP

5

C

5

C++

5

Perl

5

Fantom

3

C#

3

Forth

3

Z80 assembler

3

Human language

3

Body language

2

CSS

2

Pascal

2

BAS#

2

Haskell

1

Visage

1

Erlang

1

Modula 3

1

MPS

1

Prolog

1

Eiffel

1

InterCal

1

MatLab

1

BPMN 2

1

Lisp

1

LiveCode

1

HyperTalk

1

Total votes cast

244

View the photo.
Last year Groovy came top, this year it is Scala.
One point to bear in mind is that Groovy conferences are now well established, so possibly those
most dedicated to Groovy nonw attend those. Or maybe Scala is getting more popular.
And I was personally surprised to see how popular Python is.

Summary

Devoxx votes are nothing more than a snapshot of opinion by a proportion of the attendees of Devoxx.
Yet despite the caveats, their results can be interesting.
Its the power of the community!

The thing that irritates me somewhat is the desire to break compatibility in future Java releases. If devs so desparately desire language features that would break compatibility, there is an insane number of alternative languages for the VM out there already. Why not use these and maintain Java's language features? You can't wait for lambda expressions? Take a look into Scala or Groovy (obviously two of the most accepted java.lang.Object languages out there).